'Wrinkle in Time' Director to Make 'New Gods' Film for DC, Which Is Perfect

One of DC Comics’ most important, celebrated and, often, straight-up crazy franchises is headed to the big screen, and it appears Warner Bros. has nabbed just the right director. A Wrinkle In Time director Ava DuVernay is reportedly going to direct a movie adaptation of DC’s New Gods, legendary comics creator Jack Kirby’s mythic space superhero epic.

On Thursday, Deadline reported that DuVernay, who recently became the first woman of color to direct a $100 million-plus live-action film, was closing in on a deal to helm The New Gods. Now, it’s not quite official yet, and DC has changed course before (see: Joss Whedon’s Batgirl), but if this movie happens, DuVernay will be an excellent choice. Not only will she be DC’s second female director, following Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman, but A Wrinkle in Time showed she might have what it takes to tackle Kirby’s strange and wonderful mythology.

Kirby, who co-created the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and many other icons for Marvel at the start of his career, left Marvel for rival DC Comics in 1970. That’s where he created The New Gods, a franchise that can best be explained as a Shakespearean sci-fi fever dream. Full Kirby’s imaginative and often mind-expanding illustrations, the Fourth World saga, as it came to be known, told of the battle between the planets New Genesis and Apokolips. Godlike alien beings fought over good and evil, with Darkseid, the lord of Apokolips who sought a powerful Anti-Life Equation, being the ultimate evil.

Imagine this, but a movie.

Darkseid is a major DC villain. In the 2011 comics reboot, Darkseid was the first baddie the Justice League ever fought, and in last year’s movie, the League fought Steppenwolf, Darkseid’s uncle and the leader of his armies. Motherboxes are straight out of The New Gods. Despite this, Deadline reports that DC isn’t necessarily mandating that the new movie have any connection to the DCEU. That could let DuVernay, who already had to translate trippy high science-fantasy ideas to the screen for A Wrinkle in Time, go wild.

It helps that DuVernay’s apparently already a fan. In late December, she said her favorite superhero was the New God Big Barda, citing “many reasons.”